Rating: 
Summary: A brief review of a good book
Review: This is a very good book, well-written and delivering a coherent argument. If you want to know what it is about, read the synopsis and the other reviews. If you want to know whether it is worth reading, here is my opinion: yes, but...The best part of the book, and the most profound, is the epilogue. You have to read the rest of the book to graso the argument in the epilogue. The rest of the book is enjoyable, but it's too bad they saved the punch line for the afterword. This book is of variable quality, throughout its body. In several places, the authors felt the quotations of the post-modernists stood on their own merits as evidence that there is no there (in the PM attacks on science). When the authors engage in thoughtful analysis, they are very strong. And the epilogue pulls it all together beautifully. Well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Well-reasoned and timely
Review: Alan Sokal endeared himself to rationalists everwhere when in 1996 he published an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries" in the journal Social Text, a leading American publication of work in the social sciences that falls under a catch-all term of "postmodernist" thought. Unfortunately for the editors of this journal, however, Sokal was anything but a serious postmodernist scholar; his article was a hoax in which he intentionally misrepresented concepts from science and mathematics to make entirely specious arguments relating to the social sciences. The point was more than clear: that the intellectuals producing similar garbage for publication, when using science or mathematics as support for their superficially erudite but fundamentally meaningless discussions, simply do not know what they are talking about. "Fashionable Nonsense," which includes both "Transgressing the Boundaries" and its follow-up article as appendices, is an extension of this message, and the devastating critiques of the use of science and mathematics in the "work" of "postmodernist" theorists is one of the book's major strengths. One cannot come away from this book and fail to wonder how such intellectually fraudulent work could have gained such currency in the social sciences; Sokal and Bricmont's discussion of just this issue is also well reasoned. Another strength of the book is found in the additional critiques brought to bear on the currently popular ideas of Thomas Kuhn, relating to the progress of science, and the work of Karl Popper, relating to "falsifiability" as a fundamental property of scientific theories. If there are weaknesses in the text, they are mostly of omission. In some cases the authors choose to let the postmodernists' words speak for themselves with relatively little comment other than a well-worded version of name-calling, for example in the section on Deleuze and Guattari. Still, even here the basic message--that if a passage seems impenetrable, it is probably so for a reason, namely the obfuscation of intellectually vacant discourse--is unavoidable. It is distinctly refreshing to read a critique such as this without the politically right-wing baggage that so often accompanies it (i.e. Dinesh D'Souza et. al.) Sokal and Bricmont are admitted leftists, and their critique is intended to strengthen the political left in academia by encouraging a return to rational thought. Thus, while the postmodernist screeds they critique are arguably of little real importance outside of academia, "Fashionable Nonsense" is of genuine importance. Even if you have never encountered the work dealt with here, this book is worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, there is an external reality
Review: "L'affaire Sokol", as it has come to be known, was a pivotal moment in modern academic history. Sokol established, once and for all, that the postmodern emporer has no clothes. For those of us in the sciences, who believe in not only a real universe but a deterministic one, and for whom the gradual incursion of the deconstructionists into the hard sciences has been something of a creeping nightmare, the entire Sokol affair has been a breath of fresh air. For a long time we've watched as English, Sociology and Law faculties has gradually been taken over by people for whom all of history and the works of scholars are reduced to "texts" containing no meaning of their own. In this world, scholarship is reduced to clever wordplay in which academic success is mainly a matter of how well the writer can mimic the language and stroke the egos of the arbiters of the field. (Oddly enough, the postmodern clique still think their own "texts" are immune from such deconstruction, as much of the criticism of Sokol shows.) Sokol, suspecting something was rotten at the core of this mess, wrote a nonsensical piece that simply pushed all the right buttons and stroked the right egos, and as he feared, the postmodernists confirmed his worst fears by accepting it for publication. This left the journal's editors in a difficult posisiton- how to attack Sokol without admitting that they print articles they can't understand? The answer, of course, was personal attack, and the whole postmodern commmmunity has joined in the chorus. If you've always been suspicious that there's less than meets the eye in this new deconstructionist world, read this book. And if you're a graduate student caught under the spell of the postmodern revolution, read this book. It may help you return to scholarship and save yourself a lot of future embarrassment!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding expose of "intellectual" bankruptcy
Review: Reality is not a word that belongs in quotes. Science "studies", however, most definitely deserves the deprecatory encapsulation. Those who would seek to pronounce on what they know not are simply deluding themselves, and Sokal makes this point at great length by analysis of direct quotations. The emperor has no clothes, and Sokal's pointing out of this fact has the court all in a tizzy. Sokal makes the important point that nature is the final judge, and that theories of Physics can split atoms and create lasers. On the other hand, Science "Studies" can do little but attempt to poke at a straw man representation of science and hope to cast the one shining endeavour of humanity as folly.
Rating: 
Summary: fashionable scientific nonsense
Review: Neither Sokal nor those he criticizes are radical, and both of them are wrong at times, and right at other times. It is ridiculous to suggest that anything is more fashionable in the modern day than sporting the scientific attitude. This perhaps is the greatest danger of the day. Sokal could have chosen to talk about that, but there's not much fame in that. There is the other issue of uncertainty in science and many better lights of science than Sokal indeed have written about that. Perhaps Sokal's small-minded book serves the purpose of exposing obscure obscurantists but let us not kid ourselves into believing that he is defending rationality or some such construct.
Rating: 
Summary: Day of the Curmudgeons
Review: Sokal and Bricmont certainly come to the rescue of anyone who has tried to sift through the (often intentionally) opaque writings of many postmodern thinkers. And this book is not without its uses. If nothing else, it teaches us not to attempt to bamboozle our readers into submission by pretending to a knowledge we do not possess. There will, one could hope, always be a Sokal or a Bricmont out there who will discover our lack of ethical treatment of subject and audience, and will expose us. Or as Morrisey of the Smiths put it, "There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows -- who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall." And Sokal and Bricmont do stick their big noses into some very influential places. And we do laugh. The problem is that, despite an admirable, almost sexy, and certainly very scientific rigidity of analysis, Sokal and Bricmont refuse to truly tackle their targets, preferring to sic the crowd on them. This book would have been five or six times the work it is, had its authors taken their opponents to the mat, philosophically. After reading "Fashionable Nonsense," I was left with the feeling that I had just been present at a promising name-calling, but had been cheated of a knock-down, drag-out street brawl. "Fashionable Nonsense" could have benefitted from that brawl. Do not mistake me. Sokal and Bricmont employ a logic which is firm as steel. They pare away bad science and pseudoscience mercilessly. In fact, their reasoning reminds one of an aging boxer returning to the ring to knock out one more young, ostensibly fit opponent before retiring. Sokal and Bricmont will not revive the Age of Enlightenment with a book like this. Perhaps if they were to engage the actual philosophies of their targets... Perhaps if they were to knock down Baudrillard's theory of the precession of simulacra rather than his misuse of the word "Euclidian." Sadly, they don't. We can only hope that someone else will.
Rating:
Summary: I'm glad this book was written
Review: Unfortunately doing the right thing can count against you. Sokal and Bricmont could have chosen to enter into debate with their postmodern opponents but unfortunately it's impossible to enter into any kind of sensible conversation with a group of people whose dialogue is, at best, completely arbitrary. So he's taken a smarter approach which is simply to expose what takes place in postmodern circles to a wider audience and largely refrain from any kind of argument. Unfortunately it makes for a relatively tedious book full of out of context quotations (does postmodern writing even have a `context') that might have been generated randomly (doubtless some readers will have discovered the random postmodern text generator on the web). Still, it had to be done.
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Summary: Best part is the discussion on scientific method
Review: While the sections on the French theorists are amusing and/or depressing, the chapter on positivism, empiricism, and induction is the most worthwhile. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a scientist, and also how recent ideas establishing truth (Popper's falsification, Kuhn's paradigm, Mill's induction method, etc.) seem to never quite work out. While this discussion is inserted more for the purpose of educating a non-scientific readership, it very nicely complements some other writings (Windshuttle, et.al.) on the challenge to objectivity that the post-modernists (Focault, Derrida,...) have made. The authors' style is straighforward, and a bit earnest, but well worth adding to your library if these issues concern you.
Rating: 
Summary: Wittily and accessibly written but entirely misses the point
Review: Sokal and bricmont have written an amusing, well researched and entertaining critique of 'post-modern science'. They attack a number of eminent post-modernists, including Lacan and Irigaray amongst others,and clearly have a lot of fun pointing out the misuse of scientific and mathematical terminology by these thinkers.However, by depicting post-modern scientific critique as nothing more than nonsensical philosophical babble which tries to imitate science to achieve credibility, Sokal and Bricmont choose to obsess about what is little more than stylistic minutia, whilst ignoring the real message of the post-modern thinkers. Namely that science is not outside and above culture, but is both an influencer of and influenced by society, culture, gender assumptions. The post-modernist authors covered in this book select different areas to focus on, and arrive at very different conclusions, yet they share at least this much common ground. And thus, by ignoring the substance of post-modern science and focusing solely on the means of presentation, Sokal and Bricmont have written, in effect, a book which says nothing about post-modern science but which says much about Sokal and Bricmont. As I said before, this book is engagingly written but is equivalent to a 200 page critique of Marxist economic theory on the grounds that Marx had poor punctuation.
Rating:
Summary: A rather piece of propaganda
Review: There are some good things about Sokal and his little book. He is politically committed and the work he did in the 1980s for the Sandinistas can only be applauded. And he shows very well how thinkers such as Kristeva, Lacan and Irigrary, who purport to radicalism, in fact do little more than wrap up reactionary conclusions in obscurantist language. That's fine and should be said. Yet, that's all the book has to offer. Its errors are manifold and I shall mention only three here. First, it is not clear what Sokal's target it. Is it relativism., social constructionism, or absolute idealism? The first two by no means entail the third, but Sokal frequently assumes that they do. Most constructionists (of which I am one) do not claim that gravity and so on have no existence outside of human consciousness, rather that they can only be understood by human beings under certain descriptions that are linguistically and socially mediated. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Chomskyan admits that some aspects of language are necessarily social, making this is an insight hard to deny. Accept it and a form of relativism seems to follow. For knowledge can never be absolute - not only may the world itself change, but so might the society and so therefore might the concepts through which we understand the world. Add to this the sociological truism (developed by people like Latour and Shapin) that no epistemic claim exists in a vacuum and so may be brought into being not simply by the 'rational' thought of the individual but by certain causally efficacious social forces and the notion that 'rationality' necessarily leads to truth is severely questioned. This is the point made by the great philosopher Paul Feyerabend, outrageously misrepresented by Sokal in his book. Feyerabend's point is that, if is is true that Gaileo's great scientific discoveries were the result, not of rational thought alone, but of lying, propaganda, counterinduction and a range of social contingencies then the assumed link between rational thought and intellectual discovery is broken. If you wish to produce worthwhile knowledge, being rational and following acceptable academic canons might not be the way to do it. One might have to engage in some rather 'non-rational' practices as well. Sokal just does not consider this possibility and keeps harping on about rationality - which, of course, he never explicitly defines. Rationality is just what he, and his fellow scientists, do, apparently. Finally, the paraody itself is neither funny not parodic. It simply posists an extreme social constructionism and then makes numerous errors that a specialist in quantum phsyics would spot a mile off, but which a literary critic knows nothing about and so (rightly) takes in good faith. All Sokal's piece showed was that, as an academic, he couldn't be trusted. Now, I understand why the left wants to sustain the notion of truth, which is arguably intrinsic and necessary to language anyway, and can't be simply rejected. All I am saying is "accept the provisionality of truth claims", which is not necessarily reactionary. Just because there is no absolute truth, does not mean there are some things which can be shown to be (more or less) total shite. I realise that certain strands of 'postmodern' though lapse into absolute idealism and say things that are barely coherent. But why does that or should that bother Sokal? Why doesn't he bemoan contemporary neo-classical economics instead, which is far more ridiculous, far more socially influential, and far more reactionary than anything produced by Jacques Derrida? For more on these issues I suggest people take a look at Ian Hacking's books 'Representing and Intervening' (on the philosophy of science) and 'The Social Construction of What' (on social constructionism). Sokal, who for all his errors remains a comrade due to his politics, is just too crude a propgandist to deserve all this attention.
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